Hard to believe, but articles are popping up at business websites claiming that venerable Hewlett-Packard may fail. In their most recent fiasco, HP wrote off a loss of $8.8 of their $11.1 US billion acquisition of Autonomy and have alleged fraud in the deal. Revenue is down 7% from a year ago and the stock has hit a 10-year low. The company is laying off 27K employees but that may not be enough. Some speculate HP might be broken up into parts with buy-outs involved. This article from last May offers a good in-depth analysis of how all these problems came to pass.

I had an extraordinary conversation with an HP tech when trying to troubleshoot why a client's 5610 wifi printer kept disconnecting from the local network.

A Wi-Fi printer? Now I'm no genius, but I figured years ago that that would be a problem without ever trying it (and I never wasted my time, for that reason).

Whatever happened with using good old wired connections to all your important always-available peripherals like printers, and then accessing them either over a wired or wireless network connection, depending on what interface the computer has that's connecting to it? Ethernet and serial buses never went extinct, and many routers these days even have USB ports, making it possible to connect a printer using either method directly to your router and accessible on the network.

The client took it back and bought a Canon - end of problem.

Could have easily tried a better, more traditional, more reliable connection to your network in the first place... Wi-Fi can be anything *but* reliable. In my experience, it's like 70/25 between working inadequately and not working at all. The remaining 5 percent? Actually working well with a relatively solid connection. Wi-Fi drivers are often crap, and I wouldn't be surprised if that was the printer's problem. Available "clean" space in the 2.4 GHz frequency band in many areas is crap, too, although if another printer worked it probably wasn't interference.

With a computer you just have to wait for an updated driver to become available and install it... with a peripheral like a printer, you'd probably have to do a firmware update (much more risky).